


Forged in the North

by SolarPoweredFlashlight



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Freljord, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 21:04:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2040126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SolarPoweredFlashlight/pseuds/SolarPoweredFlashlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sejuani is made into the conqueror she is fated to be by the cruel hand of the Freljord.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forged in the North

The creature is red, slimy, frail, uncoordinated. Sejuani hardly gets a look at it before it’s wrapped up in cloth and furs and cradled in mother’s arms.

An unimpressed frown presses creases into her young, gaunt face.

“You should stop wasting time making them,” she says to her mother, “It’s just going to die like all the other ones.”

She is five.

Her mother only frowns back. Sejuani is not given the baby to hold.

She’s right, of course. This one lasts a whole three years, but in the end, she’s right.

 

—

 

Lamjav always ruffles her hair when he comes back from hunting with their mother, even though she scowls at him, even though his thick hide gloves fill her bangs with static and make them crackle and stick up in the dry winter air.

Lamjav is funny because he talks to his kills while he skins and butchers them, and he has different voices for different animals. He teaches Sejuani to skin rabbits by having the lifeless corpse of one give her instructions in a squeaky soprano.

In spite of herself, she loves Lamjav the best.

He makes it to fourteen.

They’re on the move, following after the herd of great elk whose dried flesh sustains them through winter, when a spring blizzard hits. Lamjav is there one moment and gone the next.

When he fails to return after a full cycle of the moon, mother finally accepts that the Freljord has claimed him.

Sejuani knew in her heart that he was gone forever after the first empty echo of his name on her lips failed to get a reply.

 

—

 

When she’s eight, Sejuani thinks her time has come at last.

Her life is agony, a deep, horrid, surging pain in her mouth. It’s a type of hurt she does not have words for, and she knows it must be death. She has kept it secret from her mother for weeks, and it has steadily grown worse.

Mother sees her wincing over a meal, but the interrogation accomplishes nothing.

“I’m fine,” Sejuani says, over and over, a stubborn mantra.

Her mother is too smart for her, too perceptive. Sejuani thinks she’s convinced her that all is well. She decides that when the pain becomes too much she’ll simply walk into the next blizzard to save mother the trouble of burning the body.

She moves through the camp like an abused dog, skittish, hungry, jumpy, terrified. She doesn’t want to die but surely this is death. Even at eight she refuses to cry.

Sejuani doesn’t quite understand what’s happening when mother calls her into their tent and Karlkrir’s mother and Jorntur’s mother are both there. Something strange and oily and sweet smelling is in a pot on the coals. There’s a thick blanket laid out on the floor.

“Lie down, Sejuani,” her mother says.

Fear drags its claws through her from her head down to her toes, and her soul bleeds out the gaping wounds.

This is her shroud.

She looks at her friends’ mothers. One of them has a knife.

“NO,” she screams, forgetting about her plans to walk bravely into her death. Blizzards are not the same as knives. Her mother reaches for her and she launches herself towards the tent flap, but these women know Sejuani and they are ready. They grab her before she gets far.

“Calm down,” her mother growls, holding her by the furs.

“I’m not going!!” Sejuani screams, writhing and trying to slip out of her clothes.

“This will be easier if you don’t fight,” she says, without any patience, dragging Sejuani to the blanket.

Now the tears come.

“I don’t want to die,” Sejuani snarls through the panic, kicking wildly, “I don’t _want_ to die!”

“Just wrap her,” says Jorntur’s mother, “she’s too young to understand.”

Sejuani understands just fine. They’re putting her out of her misery before she becomes too much of a burden on the clan. They’re trying to save her the pain and dishonor of a slow death.

But there’s a fire inside of her that refuses to let this be the end. She won’t die, she _won’t_!

Like the cornered cub of a cave lion she shrieks and hollers and lashes out with her limbs, clawing and biting and even reaching for her belt knife.

They push her to the floor, onto the blanket, and they roll it tight around her until her arms and legs are pinned to her body. She screams and sobs and she hates them, hates them all, but she’s helpless, one child against three adults.

They pry her mouth open and her mother puts a hand over her eyes and rumbles constantly in the background for her to lie still, lie still, but she isn’t fast enough with her hand and Sejuani sees the knife coming.

The pain of her mouth up to this point, she’d thought, was the worst pain of her life.

It was not.

 _This_ is the worst pain of her life.

The knife digs and scrapes at the rotted tooth and Sejuani chokes on tears and sounds and every movement in her mouth is blinding white-hot agony and death is the worst possible experience in the world and she thinks she’s begging them to just kill her, just kill her, but it’s hard to tell with merciless fingers holding her tongue out of the way.

An eternity of pain goes on.

It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts so much so much so much –

They reposition her on the raised bedframe and tilt her head back, but she’s done resisting, she’s weeping limply, bloody saliva rolling down her chin and neck. Her mother pulls her hand away, for whatever reason, and Sejuani watches them bring the little pot from the coals. It smells like candle wax.

They hold her head roughly and spoon the milky ooze onto the throbbing site of misery in her mouth that must have once been a tooth.

Karlkrir’s mother strokes her hair and whispers what she must think are reassuring things.

They hold her still while the mixture cools and dries and as they wait they wipe the tears and blood and drool from her face and tell her she was very brave and promise the pain will go away now.

“More stubborn than a boar, this child, to go so long without you knowing it was that rotted.”

When they finally unroll her and free her limbs, the blanket and her clothes are soaked in urine.

She doesn’t feel very brave.

But at least she’s still alive.

—

 

It’s a mystery to Sejuani that of all her siblings Erek is the one that has outlived the rest. Erek won’t be around much longer, though. He’s already nine and hasn’t made a kill yet. Erek has been here for as far back as Sejuani’s memory stretches, but she’s never cared for him much.

She steels herself for his inevitable death, and she isn’t surprised when it comes.

The hunger takes him, in the end.

Sejuani understands that mother has been feeding Erek less than she’s been feeding her last living daughter. There is no sentimentality to it – Sejuani is strong and Erek is not, and investing food in a clanmember that brings in no kills at the expense of one that does is simply not how things are done.

Still, she feels responsible, because she knows she’ll die soon too, and all of the food was wasted, so why not waste equal amounts on her pale, quiet brother? Her last brother. Her last sibling. Her mother’s last child.

There was another one, an infant, just a year ago. The Freljord claimed it before it could scream its first little cry. Mother tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, but Sejuani isn’t stupid.

She wouldn’t be the last one standing if she were stupid.

She’s a little sad when Erek goes, but mostly she’s frightened for herself. With Erek gone, it means it must be her turn next.

 

—

 

Erek dies just a few short days before they turn back for the homestead.

Mother is weary. Everyone is weary. They are not the only family to have lost children.

They return with little game. There is no singing while they stuff sausages to hang and smoke and preserve for distant winter – there is too little meat and too little time before the cold comes in earnest for any sort of joy.

The hall is not full, not even with the entire clan united at the homestead. Mother tells stories of days when there were so many people that only the strongest warriors got to eat inside, and the rest spilled out all the way to the goat pens.

Sejuani suspects that mother is just telling fables.

She doesn’t really believe that this group of tired, hungry hunters was once feared and respected. It’s nice to imagine there was a time when bears could speak and walk as men did, when their greatest fighters rode to battle on the backs of giant frost boars, when they did not fear the snow or the cold and fought with enchanted ice and slew terrible magical enemies.

But Sejuani believes what she sees with her eyes.

She sees a musty hall damp with snow that has more benches than people, she sees a clan banner that is neither bright nor proud, and she sees a stable populated by sickly mountain goats that couldn’t bear a toddler.

She sees they have fewer goblets and good steel weapons and antler hangings than they did before they left. Did the homeholders have to barter them away for food, or did one of the clans from the west or the south come raiding again?

It doesn’t really matter. She’ll die soon.

Maybe there will be a longhouse waiting for her in the afterlife that is filled with people as her mother described. Maybe Lamjav will be there waiting for her, waiting for his opportunity to ruffle her hair and tell her she did well to last so long. Maybe the smokehuts there will be filled with elk sausages and boar sausages and the goats there will be so fat with sweet hay that they give milk all year round and never run dry.

Her stomach gurgles, growls, groans.

They celebrate homecoming with a good meal that night, porridge and stew and hard bread fried in leeks and elkfat, but it doesn’t shake Sejuani’s certainty that there is little reason to enjoy it. She might make it to one more nameday, but what would the point even be? To live another year with the ghosts of her brothers and sisters whispering at her heels and biting at the exposed tips of her ears every time she leaves the warmth of a fire?

She knows she’s doing to die soon, she just doesn’t know how much time she has left or how she can expect to go. But she knows someone who can tell her.

“Mother,” she says, when she has cleaned every last droplet of fatty grease from her plate, “May I speak to the seithkona?”

Sejuani is being unusually formal because there is always something unusually formal about interacting with those who practice seithr. The Winter's Claw seithkona never leaves the homestead and takes her meals alone.

Jorntur once said she got her powers by walking naked into the forest and coupling with bears.

But Jorntur was an idiot. He died years ago.

If Sejuani’s mother is surprised, she doesn’t let it show. “Let’s bring her something from the kitchen,” she says, as an answer.

“But didn’t she already get dinner?” Sejuani asks, certain she saw someone take the usual plate out to the seithkona’s tent.

“That isn’t the point,” her mother says. She takes Sejuani by the hand and leads her to the kitchen and makes Sejuani ask for some bread and bone broth. This is as far as Sejuani, stubborn as ever, allows her mother to accompany her.

Sejuani tries to walk with pride to her death sentence, her tiny ten year old back straight, the bowl clutched carefully between her roughened hands.

She shoves the flap open with a shoulder and calls inside, willing her voice to remain steady.

“May I come in? I have some food. Uh. For you.”

“Come in, sweetheart,” beckons the seer, startling Sejuani with the confidence and compassion in her voice. The child does as she’s told and pushes her way inside.

She’s not sure what she expected, but this tent is quite normal looking. There are no mysterious potions or glittering gems or magical runestones or decorative skulls or scrolls of parchment. She goes to the little table next to the rocking chair where the crone is seated and places the bowl of broth and the bread down on its surface.

“Remind me of your name, little girl?” the seithkona asks gently. She probably thinks Sejuani has come to her with some childish problem like a lost doll or a sick dog.

“Sejuani Jurasdottr,” she answers stiffly, crouching at the woman’s feet when directed to.

“Ah, yes. You have her face. It was an Ulfsson who fathered you, was it not? Was it the brother with the big beard or the brother with the fine hammer?”

“I don’t know,” she says, bluntly. “The dead one.”

“They’re both dead, child. But your father is doubtless hunting mammoth with the gods now, so do not fear for his happiness.”

Sejuani is growing impatient. She doesn’t care if her father had a hammer or a beard or is hunting mammoths with the gods. She wants to know how much longer _she_ has before the stupid gods decide it’s her time to die. She wants to know how much longer the suffering, the hunger and the cold, will last. She wants to know how soon she’s going to break her mother’s heart.

“Go on then, Sejuani Jurasdottr. What have you come to ask me?”

“I want to know when I’m going to die.”

“Oh, sweet child. We all must die, sooner or later – “

“No, you’re not _listening_ to me. I want to know _when_ , because everybody else in my family is already gone, and I’m the _last one_ and that means it’s _my turn_.” Her little fists are balled tight, her gangly figure shaking beneath her furs.

“And what would you do with that knowledge, goatling, if you had it?”

Sejuani huffs, but she hasn’t thought that far ahead. She blurts the first answer that comes to her mouth. “I’d be able to see where I’m going.”

The chair creaks.

“If you turn your head from the fire and look out into the night, you are blind,” says the seithkona. “If you close your eyes, you are blind.”

The chair creaks again.

“But if you turn from the fire and hold your eyes shut in the darkness and have _patience_ , then when you open your eyes again you will see with the clarity of a wolf.”

That’s the extent of her magical wisdom, apparently.

Be patient.

Sejuani clenches her jaw, feeling more helpless in the face of death and starvation than she did before she came in. She jerks to her feet and goes to leave.

“Hold a moment, little one. You said you’re the last of your line? The only of your mother’s daughters alive?”

“My brothers and sisters are all dead.”

“How many did you have?” There is an edge of something in the mystic’s tone. Sejuani turns to face her again and they lock eyes. The seithkona is small, brown, wrinkled and warped, gnarled and intense. The furs she wears make her look like a blanket draped over a dead tree.

“Seven,” she says, and this is apparently the wrong answer, because the woman frowns, nods, softens. Sejuani thinks back and counts again. “Wait no, eight! Does the baby that didn’t come out alive count?”

The seithkona grips at the arms of her chair. “Yes child. It does.”

“Does that mean something?” Sejuani asks, grasping, desperate for meaning, desperate for answers, desperate for something concrete she can hold onto, something she can use, something more tangible than ‘have patience’.

“You are the last living of nine children, the end of a great northern bloodline,” the crone murmurs, groping for a cane and rising to her feet. She takes the bowl of bone broth but leaves the bread, limping towards the small, low fire that warms her tent. “I know this path,” she whispers, “I have seen this path for decades, although I never thought I’d find the one destined to walk it. Unlikely. Very unlikely.” She sneaks a skeptical glance at Sejuani.

Without ceremony, she dumps the contents of the bowl into her fire pit. The broth and bones meet the flame and coals with a great hiss of smoke. Sejuani frowns at the waste of food, even for the sake of magic.

“They say a hero will come when all seems lost, a survivor pale of hair and old of blood, last of nine and marked by wildness.

“Give me your hand,” says the seithkona with sudden urgency. Sejuani peels her glove off and warily offers her palm. With jerky, almost frantic movements, the old woman dips her hands into the smoldering ashes, seizes something Sejuani cannot see, and then deposits it in her little hand. “Close your fist as tight as you can.”

She does, squeezing down on a handful of soot and something jagged digging into the flesh of her palm. Sejuani looks up at her, uncertain.

“I said as tight as you can, child, and don’t stop,” she barks. Wide-eyed, Sejuani clenches harder. There is a snap and a stabbing pain, and then the seer is scrabbling at her fingers to draw them open again.

“The broken bone of a blue snow bird, in three pieces,” she mutters, shifting things around in the child’s outstretched palm. “Blood, yes, there would be blood on this path, and the wound choked with ash. Marked by the rune of the boar… no,” she prods at the cut, tilting her head to look at it more closely, “the _frost_ boar.”

The seithkona releases Sejuani’s hand, moving furiously now through her tent, flinging open a chest and drawing free a bundle wrapped in hide. She unwraps it and rolls it loose across her bed furs, revealing an impossibly long hide-parchment with all sorts of things written on it that Sejuani has no ability to read.

“Sejuani Jurasdottr, child of Jura Hellasdottr, fathered by Serkur Ulfsson, son of Ulf Serylsson, who was sired by Seryl Frystsson, whose mother was Seda Syrasdottr, who was a hero in her time and known to be of the bloodline of Serylda, the Iceborn.”

The crone whirls away from her page of scrawls. “Do you know what this means, child?”

“No,” says Sejuani. As far as she knows, all of the adults respect the tribe’s seithkona and put full faith in her abilities. Sometimes she helps to anticipate the movements of the herds and she’s never been wrong at least on that score. It’s hard not to be skeptical, though.

“You are marked by fate, Sejuani Jurasdottr, Last Alive of Nine Children, Blood of The Iceborn. The Winter’s Claw has awaited your coming for hundreds of years. Generations have been born and lived and died dreaming theirs would be the time that you appeared.”

“What do you mean?” she asks, looking at the broken bird bone in her palm.

“You will not die here, and you will not die hungry,” declares the seer, advancing on Sejuani, a strand of thin white hair caught on the edge of her mouth in her furor. Sejuani wants to reach out and dislodge it by she doesn’t dare. She looks instead to the woman’s eyes and finds they are bright with magic, _real_ magic. Something in her voice is different, too, like Sejuani is hearing it with her ears and hearing it in her head and hearing it in her heart.

“You will be the greatest warrior the Winter’s Claw has seen in generations,” whispers the voice of the woman, the voice of the wind, the voice of the winter. “You will lead us from the ashes of our past into the proud future we were always meant for.”

She can’t look away. There is something in the air, something like frostbite waging war against this burning heat inside of her.

“Grandchild of the Three Sisters, child of sadness and sister of death, you will strike with the strength of Nine Souls Together.”

She remembers thinking she was going to die in that tent when her mother pinned her down to repair her rotted tooth. She remembers the sudden fire that blossomed in her chest and drove her to reach for a belt knife to turn against anyone who would end her life. Sejuani feels that same fire now, but this time it crackles and roars and climbs higher inside of her instead of burning out or sputtering with fear.

“You will recover the lost helm of Serylda, an artifact stolen from us hundreds of years ago. You will conquer the tribes that have taken our rightful lands from us to the south and unite the Freljord under one banner. You will be a Bearer of True Ice as none of our kind have been in hundreds of years, forged by the north, forged _for_ the north.”

She won’t die like her brothers and sisters. She’s different. She’s strong. She’s been strong this whole time, even if she never dared to think it.

“None who stand in your path will live, Sejuani, Last of Nine, Blood of the Iceborn, Marked by the Frostboar, the Conqueror from the North. So it has been foretold, so it will be.”

The old woman closes her eyes at last. She wheezes, cracks her eyelids open again, and the glow is gone. “Tell none of your destiny, my child. Not yet. There are those with ambitions that would seek to stall or sway you.”

“So what do I do?” she asks, wondering how she’s supposed to go back to her mother’s tent and just act like nothing has changed.

“Get strong,” answers the seer. “That is the path.”

Sejuani nods.

She shakes her hand out into the firepit, wipes ashes off on her pants, and then turns away with fire still in her blood.

The sun has long set and the winds are out. Sejuani realizes she’s forgotten her gloves in the seithkona’s tent.

Strangely, she no longer feels the bite of the cold.

 

—

 

Yorthsfuyr is the only horse in the clan and he belongs to the chief.

He’s getting old, but not so old that Sejuani doesn’t remember when he was the most wild and beautiful creature she’d ever seen. He’s of mixed stock, something from the mountains, something from the hills, something from the plains. His hooves are the size of plates, his head as long as a child is tall, and his great shaggy mane comes all the way around his neck and down his chest in gleaming grey locks.

His eyes are intense and glacier blue, and even now there is a ferocity in his gait that makes prowling snow cats and bounding wolves turn from him in fear.

Yorthsfuyr is a true leader of horses, a fearless, clever stallion.

Sejuani has decided that Jorthmund doesn’t deserve him. The horse is bolder and stronger than its owner by far.

She keeps one eye on the shaggy beast as they trudge, single file, along the mountain’s ridge. His footing is sure, his intuition good. She wonders if Jorthmund has ever bred this fine stallion. Surely they should be trying to raise more like him.

“Be careful not to jostle rocks underfoot. There was a time when this was ice drake territory,” mutters Katya for all to hear.

“Nothing here but wolves now. The seithkona confirmed it,” their leader insists, his voice muffled by thick face coverings.

Sejuani’s mind flees her immediate surroundings at the mention of the seer.

The thrill and power of the prophecy was almost a year ago now, and her willingness to believe has faded. Immediately after, she was a changed child. She pushed herself to be stronger, to be fearless, to set aside thoughts of escaping death and replace them with thoughts of reaching greatness. It’s the momentum of this sudden dedication to weapons training and hunting missions that brought her here, even if the fire of her passion has started to falter.

But there has been no sign from the gods that she is destined for anything special, nothing but a fading scar in the flesh of her palm that an old woman claims looks like the rune shape for “frost boar”.

The column stops.

Sejuani tenses.

Yorthsfuyr snorts.

The horse’s long, hairy hide quivers and twitches around his rump.

Sejuani slowly pushes back her hood to listen with unblocked ears. The air is crisp, frigid, gripped with the green smell of spring even if the world around them is black and white and blue.

“There,” murmurs Guryn, pointing off at a valley of ice in the distance. He’s a skilled hunter and his eyes are sharper than an eagle’s – eventually Sejuani makes out what he’s seen.

Direwolves.

Just what they came for.

“Remember,” the chieftain hisses, sounding cowardly to Sejuani’s ears, “all we need is one pelt.”

“The bounty for two could get us a new herd of goats, three could buy the materials we need to fix the longhouse,” interjects her mother.

Sejuani says nothing, but she listens. For the months that she was gripped with the confidence that she was destined to lead their tribe one day, she began paying greater attention to what the adults spoke of beyond the logistics of a single hunt.

Clan affairs, interactions with the other tribes of the Freljord, politics that ran under the surface of day to day discussions. Now that she’s gotten into the habit she finds she can’t stop thinking as if one day these will be her responsibility. They probably won’t be.

What could a broken bird bone and a family history possibly guarantee?

Nothing, she’s concluded.

The confidence that stirred inside her immediately after was, without a doubt, the true gift given to her by the seithkona. Perhaps that was what she’d really meant to accomplish. Magic-weavers could be strange and sly in that way.

“The yakfolk are stupid,” says Urloff, “We could probably cut a pelt in half and tell them it’s two animals. We just need to be better at bartering than they are.”

“Your dishonesty will get us raided again, just you watch,” Katya replies.

“I’m not afraid of fat, lazy yakfolk who can’t even protect their own stupid cows from wolves.”

“Just focus on one guaranteed kill instead of getting greedy,” says Jorthmund, putting an end to the argument. “You all know the plan. Let’s go.”

Sejuani pulls her hood back up, checks that her knife and axe are where they should be, and then tightens her grip on her spear and prepares to go hunt direwolves.

She is eleven.

 

—

 

“Whatever’s in the snare is huge,” Hettor says, rubbing his ugly wisps of new facial hair. “It’s making so much noise. Maybe it’s a whole elk, or a wolf, or even a cave lion!”

“I’m sure it made less noise than you’re making now,” Sejuani mutters, unimpressed. Hettor is a habitual liar when it comes to the sizes of his catches. He’d talk a salmon into a whale if you stood and nodded long enough.

They come through the trees to where he set his trap.

“Whoa!” he shouts, recklessly, foolishly. Normally Sejuani would shoot him a glare – whooping like that in the Freljord is just asking to be killed by either an avalanche or a snow cat – but she is transfixed by the sight of the creature thrashing wearily against the wire snare. “I’ve never seen a white boar before!” Hettor enthuses, drawing his knife. “Everyone’s gonna be so impressed when we bring back this kill! I’m totally keeping this hide for boots or something.”

“Shut up and put that damn knife away,” she finally manages to say.

“Why, what’s wrong?” Hettor scans the trees for predators, suddenly tense.

Sejuani can’t bring herself to voice her hopes. Mother says frost boars are born as white as snow and mature into a silver coat, gleaming like the finest of blades.

She slides closer and watches the trapped animal toss its head from side to side. The snare, meant for rabbits, didn’t manage to catch it around the neck. Instead there is a bloody line across its white face where the wire has looped around its snout and one stubby tusk.

Its build isn’t right to be a normal forest boar, although it’s about the right size. If this is truly a legendary frost boar, Sejuani can’t imagine how anybody could ride it.

She moves silently closer and closer. It’s tired. It’s been fighting this snare for at least the hour it took Hettor to come back to camp and find her, but probably longer.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

The white boar turns its eyes on Sejuani and grunts a challenge. It’s tall enough at the shoulder to come up to her hip.

Its eyes glow Freljord blue.

Large, frightened eyes. Brave, but young.

“It’s a baby,” Sejuani says.

“Damn big baby,” Hettor scoffs. “You want help killing it? Oh shit, you think the mom is still around?”

“I’m not killing it,” she says. “You go stand guard and let me know if you see anything coming.”

“What do you mean you’re not killing it?? You’re going to let it go free? Think of how much food is in that one boar. It’d take me twenty rabbits to make up for losing a kill that size. It’s my snare that caught it, that’s my boar.”

“I’ll get you thirty rabbits. This boar is mine.”

“No,” he says, coming up behind her. She sees out of the corner of her eye that his knife is out. She isn’t afraid for her safety, but she knows the knife is meant for the boar. _Her_ boar.

She whips around and elbows him in the wrist. He drops the knife in the snow. She grabs a fistful of his parka and lifts him until he’s standing on the tips of his toes.

“You gonna fight me for it?” she asks, her tone dry. He’s got a year on her but he’s as frail at fourteen as she was at seven. There’s a reason he lays traps for rabbits instead of joining the hunting parties that target elk.

He throws his hands up in surrender almost immediately. “Gods, Sejuani, have it if you want it that bad.” She drops him and then collects his knife from the snow. “But I still get those rabbits, right?”

Sejuani offers him the knife back. “Deal’s a deal,” she says.

The boar has been silent this whole time, watching them with intense scrutiny. At some point it backed away from the two humans, held in place by the snare around its snout but turning to keep its front to them and create as much buffer space as possible.

Sejuani wonders how smart it is.

With the ownership of the creature settled, she draws in closer. Slowly, she offers it a hand as she would a strange dog. It watches the limb, growing tense, but makes no move to sniff it like Sejuani might have expected.

She wishes Hettor weren’t here. She wants to try to talk soothingly to the boar but she’s too self-conscious with the clanmember right there.

“I thought I told you to go stand watch,” she snaps. He scrambles to obey. He’s probably more scared of the possibility of the boar’s mother than he is of Sejuani’s displeasure, but either way he does as he’s told.

Sejuani returns her attention to the boar. A glance at its underside informs her it’s a male.

Blood oozes from his face where the wire bites deep. She needs to get that off of him and patch it up, but as soon as the wire comes loose he’ll be free to run and then he’ll be lost to her forever.

She unbuckles her belt and pulls it free of her pants. The boar is too exhausted to do more than shake his head at her when she comes close. The belt, designed deliberately to be so long that it’s worn with an extra tail of length hanging down from the buckle, fits just so around its neck and then provides a short leash that Sejuani stands on the end of. Prepared for the boar to bolt as soon as it’s free, she works loose the snare.

The wire loop is slack now, but the boar’s ferocious struggles have buried it deep into the flesh of his face. She starts to pull it from the bloody gouge and then, lightning fast, the boar screams its pain and slashes out with its tusks. They’re small but sharp, and Sejuani stumbles back clutching her hand. The boar backs away but not before Sejuani can get a hold on the end of the belt. He looks up at her, tossing his tusks defiantly, the bloody, gleaming wire still stuck in his snout.

“Okay,” Sejuani mutters, “That was my fault. I should have known that would hurt you.”

She pulls her glove off to see how bad the damage is and is pierced by the memory of the seithkona’s words.

_Last of Nine, Blood of the Iceborn, Marked by the Frostboar._

The bleeding gash from the young frost boar’s tusk is overlaid exactly on the old, fading scar from the snapped bone.

She looks up into the eyes of the boar.

“I was meant to find you,” she says, softer than dew on grass. She gets to her knees and, holding the belt firmly, works the last of the wire free without ever breaking eye contact.

“A great hero like the heroes of old who charged into battle on the backs of giant Frostboars,” Sejuani murmurs.

She had wavered. She had lost faith in the truth of the prophecy and in the power of seithr.

But this is undeniable proof that the seer wasn’t lying and wasn’t wrong.

Sejuani isn’t going to die young and malnourished, devoured by the cold.

Fate has other plans for her.

 

—

 

Something’s wrong with Bristle.

He’s agitated. When he smells Sejuani coming he calls out to her with a low series of snorts, which usually means he wants her attention for a specific reason.

She switches her path quickly, forgetting about curling up in a pile of furs to rest until she’s sure her friend is safe and well.

She wasn’t gone _that_ long. Maybe he just missed her because she stopped to check the trap line on the way back from watch duty, which she doesn’t normally do.

The sun is just coming up when she rounds the corner of her tent and comes to the awning where he sleeps. He isn’t sleeping now, up, restless, grouchy.

“What is it?” she asks, scanning their immediate surroundings and seeing nothing.

Bristle snorts loudly at her and throws his head back.

“Okay, alright, calm down, I’m here.” She puts a firm hand on one tusk and moves in close to press a soothing touch to his cheek. Sejuani examines his makeshift stable as she settles the great frost boar, feeling unnerved. Why is his bridle on the ground? Why has his water trough been knocked over? “What happened here, Bristle?” she wonders, stroking the coarse hairs above his eyes.

Eventually, she manages to calm him.

She hangs his bridle up where it belongs, rights the trough, and then grabs the bucket. His water will need refilling, and she should really gather some fresh grass to prevent the damp dirt floor from getting churned into mud.

She’s just gotten back and is dumping the bucket of cold river water into the trough when she hears people approaching.

Sejuani finishes what she’s doing, hangs the bucket on its peg, and then turns to see who wants her.

It’s Chief Jorthmund, and her back stiffens. He’s got three of his favourites with him, some of the clanmembers too old to chafe restlessly under his rule but too young to remember anybody better. Sejuani doesn’t actively dislike him, but if he were a half competent leader their clan probably wouldn’t be teetering on the brink of extinction. She sleeps well at night knowing she’s destined to replace him sooner or later.

“Chief,” she says, casually respectful. “What can I do for you?” There’s no doubting he’s come to her tent on the far side of camp with a purpose in mind.

He’s probably here to finally give her permission to mount the aurochs hunt she proposed nearly a month ago. In the three years since she found Bristle, she’s become indispensable to the hunting parties. They’ve tripled the number of elk they take every summer with the help of her magnificent frost boar. Jorthmund has every reason to give her the go-ahead to attempt this more ambitious target.

He crosses his arms over his chest, jutting out his bearded chin with all its impressive braids and throwing his shoulders back. Sejuani has learned he does this when he’s trying to seem more confident than he really is, and she braces herself.

“As your Chief, I’m taking over ownership of the frost boar.”

Sejuani clenches her jaw.

“By what right?”

She should have seen this coming. _Dammit,_ she should have seen this coming! They’ve been eating horse meat for a week now. Of course Jorthmund thinks he’s entitled to a replacement mount.

“The right of the clan Chieftain,” he says, staring her down. Behind her, Bristle rumbles a low threat. Sejuani narrows her eyes, coming swiftly to a guess at why his bridle was off its peg.

“You came and tried to take him while I was on watch.”

His frown is an affirmative answer.

“Bristle is not yours to take,” she says through gritted teeth, taking a step forward. The muddy ground squelches beneath one foot, the summer snow crunches beneath another.

“I am your Chief and you will do as I say,” he booms, staring down at her, trying to use his height to intimidate her.

“I am a hunter of the Freljord and a warrior of the Winter’s Claw,” she bites back, unimpressed, “and what is mine is mine.”

Behind her, Bristle becomes more vocal, grunting and squealing. She has no doubt he’s thrashing his tusks menacingly, and no fear that he will accidentally catch her in the back. She trusts this frost boar more than she trusts her clan leader.

“You are a child,” he says, exasperated. “You’ve done well, raising it this far. But now that it’s big enough to bear a man, it’s a waste to place a sixteen year old girl on its back. It’s time to hand it over to someone who can actually put it to use.”

“Show me, then,” Sejuani challenges. She steps to the side, revealing Bristle in his fury, pawing at the ground of his alcove, tossing his gigantic head, groaning his rage. “Show me how much better you are at handling him.”

Jorthmund’s nostrils flare and his lips part briefly. He recollects himself.

“Bridle him and calm him down and bring him to me, then.”

Sejuani crosses her arms over her chest and leans back against one of the awning’s sturdy support poles. “I’m just a child. Better let you do it.”

Jorthmund clenches his fist and takes a menacing step towards Sejuani.

This is a mistake.

Bristle lunges forward with a murderous roar, gets both tusks between the chief and his rider, and launches Jorthmund halfway to the next tent over with a flick of his powerful head.

The three warriors who came with him put their hands on their weapons.

“If you have a problem with my boar, you have a problem with me,” Sejuani says coolly, and this makes them pause. Last year Sejuani killed an Icefire Clan woman when they tried to raid the Winter’s Claw homestead like they were used to doing with impunity. When her grieving husband showed up two weeks later demanding single combat to the death with whoever had slain her, Sejuani stepped forward fearlessly.

He’d laughed.

Sejuani hadn’t hesitated when the time came to make the killing blow.

“Here, Bristle,” she says now, face solemn. The frost boar comes up beside her and noses his snout up against her outstretched hand, eyes fixed suspiciously on the trio.

“What’s going on?” Asks Katya, poking her head out of her tent.

The noise has drawn a few others, Sejuani realizes.

Now that they have an audience, she can sense that the stakes have changed.

“Everything is fine,” the Chief says, already on his feet and shaking wet snow from his breeches. He fakes a smile that fools nobody. His majestic, fatherly whiskers don’t hide his inner weakness, Sej thinks to herself.

He collects up his gang and returns to his hut.

Sejuani keeps the details of the event to herself, but their tribe is small and tight-knit and by dusk everybody knows that the Chief tried to claim her frost boar for himself and she rebuffed him effortlessly and confidently.

He doesn’t come asking for Bristle again, but he does approve her hunting plan.

The Chief sends Sejuani and Bristle out into the mountains to hunt aurochs and then somehow fails to send the rest of the hunting party along to the established meeting point. The snowstorm hits exactly when he expected it to, engulfing the area of the mountain Sejuani said she planned to hunt, and the tribe mourns the loss of a promising hunter.

A week later Sejuani and Bristle come back into camp dragging the carcass of the biggest aurochs any of them have ever seen. She is wounded, frostbitten, and in desperate need of rest, but she is victorious.

And now she knows better than to think of Chief Jorthmund as an ally.

 

—

 

The siethkona – Birjyta, as Sejuani has come to know her – presses her withered hands around the warrior’s strong youthful ones. Her thumb finds the boar’s scar, as it always does.

“You are ready, my child,” she says, her charismatic voice reduced to an earnest whisper by her old age. “This is your _destiny_.”

Sejuani nods. She has no words for a suitable reply.

She rises from the foot of old Birjyta’s chair. Today is her eighteenth nameday, and the seer seems tiny and crumpled now when she stands beside her.

Today is her eighteenth nameday, and she is now old enough by the laws of her clan to issue a challenge for leadership.

Today is her eighteenth nameday, and she will fulfill the promise of a prophecy with a fistful of blood, ash and broken bone.

She pushes past the tent flap and out into the wind.

Nothing has been handed to her, not by man and not by the gods.

She touches the pommel of her blade and summons her strength.

“Fate is not an iron chain that binds you and drags you along its chosen course,” Birjyta told her once, years ago. “Nor is fate a sturdy horse upon which to sit and effortlessly outpace those who walk on foot. Fate is a rope, my dear, a rope unraveled into a dark cave, leading up to the only pinprick of daylight. Even once you’ve found the rope, groping blindly in the darkness, it is up to _you_ to take hold of it and _climb_. Nothing but your own strength will see you to the top.”

Sejuani listens to the Freljord warn of winter. She feels the chill of ghosts along her spine. She turns her eyes upon the longhouse and imagines it overflowing with strong, well-fed Winter’s Claw warriors all the way out to the goat pens.

She exhales, banishing fear, banishing doubt.

This is her destiny.


End file.
